The Year of Magical Thinking

Adapted by Rush Rehm from the play by Joan Didion18"

“Life changes in an instant. The ordinary Instant."

In 2007, Joan Didion adapted her best-selling memoir about being blindsided by death, losing both her husband and her daughter in close succession.In his review of the memoir, Robert Pinsky wrote in the New York Times:

“In December 2003, the only daughter of Didion and her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, fell into septic shock from a runaway pneumonia infection. Her doctors at New York's Beth Israel North put the young woman - she was married only five months earlier - into an induced coma. On the evening of Dec. 30, her parents returned from the hospital to their apartment. While the couple were talking over supper, John Gregory Dunne slumped in his chair with one hand raised, dying so suddenly that for a moment his wife mistook the event for a failed joke…I need to explain here that The Year of Magical Thinking is not a downer. On the contrary. Though the material is literally terrible, the writing is exhilarating and what unfolds resembles an adventure narrative…

Rush Rehm, Artistic Director of the Stanford Repertory Theater and Professor of Theater & Performing Studies and of Classics at Stanford University, created a short piece excerpted from the one-woman play performed by Vanessa Redgrave on Broadway.I performed the piece at Stanford, during its Summer Theater season and at a conference: The Poetics of Aging: Towards a New Understanding of the Many Verses in Life. Directed by Rehm, the play is an exploration of loss and grief, “the most general of afflictions.”

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